74o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



History at Edinburgh, succeeded his distinguished friend as Professor 

 of Natural History in that institution, a post which he has continued 

 to hold up to the present day. Since that time Mr. Huxley has lived 

 in London a life of continued and brilliant labor. From 1863 to 1869 

 he held the post of Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Sur- 

 geons. He was twice chosen Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the 

 Royal Institution of Great Britain. In 1869 and 1870 he was Presi- 

 dent of the Geological Society, having previously served as secretary. 

 During the same period he was President of the Ethnological Society. 

 In 1870 he filled the office of President of the British Association for 

 the Advancement of Science, and in 1872 was elected secretary to the 

 Royal Society. He has been elected a corresponding member of the 

 Academies of Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg, and of other foreign 

 scientific societies, has received honorary degrees from the Universi- 

 ties of Breslau and Edinburgh, and last year was presented with the 

 Order of the Northern Star by the King of Sweden. Since 1870 he 

 has been one of the members of the Royal Commission on Scientific 

 Instruction and the Advancement of Science. From 1870 to 1872 he 

 served on the London School Board as one of the members for Mary- 

 lebone, and during that time was chairman of the Education Com- 

 mittee which arranged the scheme of education adopted in the Board 

 Schools. In 1872 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of 

 Aberdeen. 



In this skeleton narrative of the career of this distinguished 

 naturalist we have purposely omitted any list or any critical estimate 

 of his writings ; but we have great pleasure in laying before our read- 

 ers, as a token of what is thought of him by those who are laboring 

 in the same field of science, the following communication from one 

 who ranks, in his own country as well as among ourselves, as one of 

 the very first of German naturalists. 



The more general, year by year, the interest taken by all educated 

 people in the progress of natural science, and the wider, day by day, 

 the field of science, the more difficult is it for the man of science him- 

 self to keep pace with all the advances made — the smaller becomes 

 the number of those who are able to take a bird's-eye view of the 

 whole field of science, and in whose minds the higher interest of the 

 philosophical importance of the whole is not lost amid a crowd of fas- 

 cinating particulars. Indeed, if at the present moment we run over 

 the names distinguished in the several sciences into which Natural 

 Knowledge may be divided — in Physics, in Chemistry, in Botany, in 

 Zoology — we find but few investigators who can be said to have thor- 

 oughly mastered the whole range of any one of them. Among these 

 few we must place Thomas Henry Huxley, the distinguished British 

 investigator, who at the present time justly ranks as the first zoologist 



